File 001: The Ballad of Kato and the Redmond Ripper

I can't really put to words why i've decided to do this feed, so let me tell you a story.

Almost twenty years ago, where I grew up, there was a couple of blocks where people just didn't go. For the better part of a year, someone was murdering transients and locals. It never made front page on the screamsheets downtown, because hey, who downtown cares about a bunch of winos and hood rats getting cut up, right? However, I know a few news feeds ran small stories about it. If you scan news archives from 2054 and query "The Redmond Ripper" you can still find them.

In this hood, there was a guy. No one knew his name, but everyone called him Kato. Because...well, because he was asian, and there just weren't a lot of asians in the area back then. No one knew where Kato came from. No one knew anything about him, really. All we know, is one day he just showed up and became a neighborhood fixture. He only seemed to be around at night, and it was always in one of the bars on the block. According to the waitress at one of the watering holes, the only time he ever said anything was when he ordered a drink.

People talk. So naturally, there were a lot of rumors going around about Kato. Some saying he was on the run from one of The Megas, others he was a hitman for the Triads or Yakuza. The most common story was that he was The Redmond Ripper. It seemed to make sense to a lot of people, since he first showed up shortly after the first body was found. It didn't really help his case, when he'd disappear a for a few nights after a murder.

Every couple of weeks, a new body was found all slashed up and barely in one piece. This went on for ten months. People were scared. Who could blame them, right?

One night, a girl who made her living turning tricks on the corners got the ire of one of the local gangs. She wasn't from around here, and the gangers took great offense to that. I guess they thought she was keeping business from locals, I don't know. Regardless, they were giving her a hard time one night, and one thing led to another. They drew blades on her, and the girl from off the block ran. She ran with the type of swiftness characteristic to someone running for their life.

Like I said, this girl wasn't from the neighborhood. She didn't know where she was going, and she sure didn't know what she was getting into when she wound up in the Ripper's block. When the RIpper found her, she was caught blind. She ran like hell. Later, when she would burst through the door of a local Stuffer Shack, hysterical, she'd say she was attacked by something "that looked like a deformed mutant troll, with big fraggin' claws and teeth".

How did she escape the Ripper, you ask? I'm getting to that. After she turned and ran from the Ripper, she hauled hoop around a corner and ran smack into someone else. It was Kato, stoic as a stone. She says he merely looked at her and grunted, nodding his head to tell her to keep running. That he'd take care of it. She said the last thing she saw as she looked over her shoulder one last time, was Kato drawing a sword - an honest to god samurai daito, from her description - from a sash on his belt, and assuming a fighting stance.

No one knows exactly what happened between Kato and the Redmond Ripper, or exactly how it went down, but they say you could hear the two of them fighting well into the next morning. All night long, bestial snarls and the sounds of steel and claw violently clashing against one another like a bloody lullabye to darkness of night.

That was the last time anyone ever saw Kato. It was also the last known instance of the Redmond Ripper. There were no more killings after that.

Don't feel bad if you've never heard the ballad of Kato and the Redmond Ripper. It may have been before your time, or it may have just happened in a different world than yours. But still, it happened and no one knows. Everyone involved in the story is a long time gone; Kato's bartender, The Girl from Off the Block, even the gangers who harassed her. They were devoured by this thing we call The Sprawl.

I think ultimately, that's why I'm doing this. Because The Sprawl keeps going, moving with a monolithic persistence, completely and utterly uncaring about the people in it. It rolls over some, and casts others away like nothing, but it keeps going.

It lives in a place of static and noise pollution. We all scream into the night sky, and go unheard, merely adding to the cacophony.

Everyone has a story to tell. They make us who we are. They make us individuals among the masses of huddled meat which passes as civilization these days.

That's why I'm here. To tell those stories. As many as i can.

Barrio Billy, signing off.